Blind Idiot Translation
This troper's coworker had a tattoo of a kanji character he couldn't identify. After a little research, he realized that it was tomo ("friend" or "companion"), but it was reversed, as if viewed in a mirror! (She already knew, and had plans to get it covered up.) **A boy in my brother's class got a tattoo as a senior. It was the Gaelic symbol for motherhood. He didn't believe them. *One of this editor's friends had "I wonder if my friend will understand this" auto-translated to Polish as his MSN handle; he did, despite the grammar being mangled beyond recognition. *This troper was once an employee of Blizzard's billing department, where we would often deal with Chinese gold farming agencies attempting to shut down other Chinese gold farming agencies. The letters were invariably translated through some babelfish program and as such, Blizzard Entertainment Company invariably translated into "Flying Snow Happy Funtime Building Place." We also got a letter which ended with the phrase "I hold your mother passionately." and we have no idea what they were trying to say (context was thanking us, so it definitely was not an insult, which was our first thought.) **In order to shut down another Chinese we frequently to raise the organization gold, the flying snow computation partial staffs process the Chinese gold raise organization to attempt there are this troper. The character certainly by the babelfish program, itself converts, as for snow happy Funtime Blizzard Entertainment Company " Please by all means must converts the flight building arrangement. " Moreover as for explains " for us; The terminal full of affection looks after character. " grasped with me is obtained; And we said any is attempted did not must have the idea, (the conditions is appreciated in us, resolution therefore our first idea. This is not is) insult **Wow, this is Made Of Win. May I use "Flying Snow Happy Funtime Building Place" in a story (or as a title for a story)? ***Why would you have to ask? It's not like there's a trademark on it. ***Not technically anyway. *This troper once saw a soccer player figurine sold in France with "Pour les ventialteurs de foot" written on it, which means "For soccer fans", except it means fan as in "device that blows air in your face". *This editor's father, who works as a proofreader, once proofread a book written by someone for whom English was their second language, titled "A Rigid Journey." **Was it about pipe wrenches? *A bar near this troper's house is called "Cafe Happys Lounge". Having never been inside, she has no idea whether it's supposed to be a joke that sounds like a Blind Idiot Translation or if it's an actual translation of a foreign chain's name. *Two really, really poor examples of Engrish as given by a Hong Kong Wii Sensor Bar instruction booklet (probably a bootleg) were "2 piece of battery are required to operate" (for something which required 4 batteries) and "Wireless has less chance of you fall!" Probably with the exclamation mark as well. *After a bad Chobits bootleg (the first 24 episodes were actually very good... with credits still in from the fansubbers. They seem to have done their own translations very the last two, particularly amusing because the last episode is a recap episode featuring footage from previous (well-translated) scenes), this troper still uses the word "Metamorph!" as an exhortation against perverts (Although, as I understand it, this is actually a fairly literal translation from the Japanese etymology). **Hentai does mean metamorphosis. But it is meaning as pervert is more well-known (and obvious, given the context). **Wait, isn't that Henshin? **Both tai and shin in these cases basically mean "body." *One translation class This Troper attended had one of these as an assignment, we had to work out what it might have meant. *This Troper's history teacher was teaching about the Bay of Pigs Invasion. He mentioned the way that Bay of Pigs is said in spanish, but the word he used for "Pigs" was the translation for using "pig" as an insult. **I'm afraid your teacher might be correct there. Bay of Pigs is English for BahÃa Cochinos. In which "Cochinos" means "Pigs", yes, as an insult. Well, basically any synonym for "pig" is an insult in Spanish... **Any synonym for "pig" in spanish is indeed an insult, but it depends heavily on the context, region and even idiosyncrasy. So the opposite is also true, that any synonym for "puerco" -the most accurate translation of "pig"- is not an insult but a proper name for the animal. So in the case of Bahia de Cochinos, it is not meant as an insult. *This troper is Hungarian. We have a lot of ridiculous translation errors. Best examples are "See you later" which is almost never translated to its proper Hungarian counterpart and "manta ray" which is either translated to "manta sugÃ¡r" (which can be translated back as "manta beam") or isn't even translated. And I didn't even mentioned the various ROTFL-translations of Technobabble... **This troper is incapable of reading "manta beam" without picturing it as being shouted out loud like some sort of super finishing move from an anime... **This (different) troper frequents an English-language Image Board who has a very vocal Hugarian user. He's the source of many funnies: not only is his English one step up from a Blind Idiot Translation (and also rife with myriad spelling errors), but he humorously overreacts to nearly everything. Then there's the one time he said "Our own language is crap...." *Heard at second hand, but still funny. Mandarin has two words for full: one for a person being full after eating (bao), and another for a thing being full like a shelf or hard drive (man). One kid, who was born in stateside and probably didn't speak Chinese regularly, said 'I'm full' using the second word. The story always gets a good laugh from older folks who hear it. *This troper took Japanese class, so sometimes friends ask him to translate things for them. He was once handed a clipping from a 2ch post. It was mangled 2ch-speak, but he managed to get the gist of it. He was then asked what this smiley face was doing: ~~(Â°∀Â°)~~. Apparently the guy thought the universal quantifier (the ∀) was supposed to be a hand throwing up the devil horns. (It's a mouth.) **I CAAAAAAAAAAAA~~(Â°∀Â°)~~AAAAAAAAAAAME!! *This one recalls a story told to her by her father about bad subtitles in a film he saw when he was in high school. (This would've been in the mid-to-late 1960s, by the by.) For English class, they watched a film version of the Russian translation of Hamlet. Now, dad said that this translation is actually really good - apparently regarded as one of the best translations of Shakespeare. So when it came time to add English subtitles, you'd think they would use the original text. But no, they had to get the cheapest translator they could find... End result? "To be or not to be" became "Existentialism is fruitless." *This Troper knows French and Spanish, but likes to watch French and Spanish movies with English subtitles because...well...sometimes the translations can be a little (read: a whole hell of a lot) different from what the actors are actually saying. *Not exactly Engrish, but more of a reverse-directional version of Blind Idiot Translation: Once in an assignment for Japanese class, this Troper tried to convert the word "fhqwhgads" into katakana. After realizing just how bad of an idea it was (never mind that there is no Q sound in Japanese, though ギュ ("gyu") comes close), this Troper decided to use a different in-joke: Nouns Turned Verbs (add -'d to the end of any noun. Also from Homestar Runner). Also to a VERY bad effect. (In case you're wondering, the intent was to see if Sensei knows about Homestar Runner. Obviously not.) **This troper wonders if this is an example in itself, since she spent awhile staring at the page trying to figure out why you'd use ギュ for Q, when you can take the tenten off and get キュ (kyu), which sounds almost exactly like 'Q'. Maybe she's missing something? *This troper owns a cheap dollar store keyboard where a socket for external power is labeled "POWERSOCKEY" (this of course has become his pet name for the keyboard itself), and the two settings for the power switch are apparently "Off" and "No". While both of these could be unnoticed typing errors, he has no idea what "Eight-twelve music selected", printed across the top of the keyboard, could possibly mean. *This troper once tried translating Daddy Yankee's song 'Gasolina' through a babel fish program because she didn't know what the lyrics meant. The first few lines are something about the cat (babe) turning on the motors, but it came out of the program as, "My cats pledge the motors", and this troper was totally confused. *This troper's friends used to have lots of fun with online text translators, especially with pasting in English song lyrics and running them through multiple languages. "Seven Seas Of Rhye" by Queen yielded "I challenge the mighty titanium can" (instead of "the mighty titan"), "Ice Ice Baby" included "freeze the ice cold baby too" (instead of "ice ice baby too cold", of course), and perhaps best of all, in "Fuel" by Metallica, "Gimme that which I desire" somehow became "Gimme that which my the Irish". And there exists an mp3 of this troper reciting an oddly Shakespearean machine re-translated version of "Baby Got Back" by Sir Mix-A-Lot (or as the translation would have it, "The Baby Returned" by Mr. Mix-A-Leaves) over Pachelbel's Canon. *One of the people this troper R Ps with isn't that good with grammar, but when he fixed that problem, he decided to make his main character keep up the bizarre engrish to emphasize his screw-up personality. One of my personal favorites is "DECLARE ME THE WIN". *This Troper remembers when the translator for the Spanish safety meeting complained that the handouts only had sense if you spoke both English and Spanish as they didn't account for grammar changes. *This troper recalls seeing a list of mis-translations of instruction booklets. One which came with a blender (and which the troper cannot remember the source language) simply read in English, "Do not use for the other use." The mind boggles. **This troper personally saw that exact warning in a piece of networking equipment ordered from Korea. It was followed by a stern warning: "Do not try to change it on your mind." **This Italian troper once read an instruction manual for her new mouse. Now, the Italian word for the thing that moves your pointer around the screen is still "mouse"; the word for the animal is "topo". Also, "palla" is the correct translation for the term "ball" both in the meaning of round object that rolls and testicle (but I think it holds a more vulgar undertone). Well, the manual read "se la palla del topo ha difficoltÃ a muoversi, pulirla". Which means ''If the rodent's testicle has difficulty moving, clean it." ***Even in English, this can be awkward. *A set of Korean-made kitchen knives came in a package with the warning "Keep out of children." **Assuming the owner is not a psychotic serial killer, that's actually good advice. Painfully obvious, but good nonetheless. *Back around 1980 or so, this troper's sister bought a small black & white TV, Made In Korea. The manual contained gems such as "Beeldbinnenband" and "Televisie zetten", posing as translations for "Picture tube" and "Television set". Well, "binnenband" *is* a translation of "tube", but it refers to the type you may find in a tyre, and "zetten" *is* a translation of "set". As a verb, not a noun. It appears to have come out of the first Korean-Dutch translation program (version 0.1-pre alpha), or some hapless Korean had only been able to find a dictionary that translated into Dutch from Swahili, forcing him to use his Korean-Hungarian and Hungarian-Swahili phrasebooks as intermediate steps. *This troper recently saw "Insert CD and run wizard", on a sleeve for an installation CD for a router, translated in French to "InsÃ©rez le magicien de CD et de course", which would actually translate back to "Insert the wizard of the CD and race". **Shouldn't this be "Insert the magician of the CD and of the race"? ***I'm French (-Canadian, actually). It translates back in english as "insert the CD and race (or racing, the noun) magician". *My school has an exchange program with a school in Japan. This troper got to host one, and gets e-mails from her saying things like "I'm a person with no sence of machine" (talking about getting a facebook) and "To abroad has many intererts and discovers". Literally every time they opened their mouths, someone went 'Aww!' *This troper has seen a "Forbid to embezzle the fire apparatus" sign in a restaurant in Wuxi (near Shanghai). This admonishment has been subjected to a limited sort of Memetic Mutation within his (largely bilingual) workplace.This troper: You are forbidded to embezzle the writing apparatus. *This troper read a sign on the door of my French class to a French exchange student, and he chuckled, because apparently it said "Do make sure to be not in here without the proper pencil." It evolved quickly into a meme, and then became mutated several times. One of which was "Do make sure to be not in here without the proper people" *This troper's friend once brought to school the manual for his new phone. "Do not throw battery in fire may cause to rupter leak and cooks meals" *One of this troper's friends once found a fortune cookie that said "Be patient! The Great Wall didn't got build in a day!" *This troper's roommate bought shampoo from Chinatown that was anti-dandruff. The only English words on it were "Anti-Falling Shampoo"- as in, anti-flaking. That's the only reason he bought it. *This troper freely engages in it for the Werewolf: The Forsaken game he's running, mostly because he's playing it out as something resembling a bad '40s or '50s pulp movie. And it works quite well, thank you. *This troper once had the pleasure of reading a machine translation which referred to the director's assistant as the director's midfielder, apparently because of a homonym in the original language. *In France, this troper once saw spare ribs labelled as "shortcomings of pork" (for "travers de porc"). *Every once in a while, this troper tries to talk to someone who speaks a different language. Since this happens online, theres online translators involved. So, naturally, engrish will be a sure part of the conversation. *This troper saw plenty in Normandy. *I saw a French ad for a (probably English) online game that reads "HÃ© vous! Comme vampires?". Which translates back to "Hey you! Similar vampires?". Most likely the original was "like vampires". *I remember seeing in a TV schedule the French game show "La Carte au trÃ©sor" translated as "Card from the safe" (instead of "Treasure map"). *This troper remembers the drivers for a modem he bought for his PC had a rather poor translation; when trying to set it up within Windows 95, it'll display the error "This program must no execute under this version of Windows". Also, there was the DVD remote he saw that warned not to "old battery new one", and the "Relevant Crazy Warning" he saw on the box to a bootleg Famicom *The fiction for the end of Warhammer's Storm of Chaos campaign was released on the Spanish site before any of the others. A site I frequented at the time quickly ran it through Babelfish and... well, the result inspired a strip in a Warhammer-based webcomic. Hellcannon as "Infernales tubes", Archaon, the Gentleman of the Time End... It had everything. Naturally, the comic finished up with a Chaos Dwarf shouting "All your base are belong to us!" *This French troper once had an Irish exchange student student in his class who was mightily confused at the concept of a "bald-mouse" mentioned in a physics test, and why it would use echolocation. (The French for "bat" is chauve-souris, the individual words mean "bald" and "mouse". And no, I don't know who ever shaved a mouse and decided it looked like a bat. We're just weird like that.) *We tried to directly translate "The Muffin man" into french, then back into English through an online translator. what we got was "Do you know the Man of Roll, the Man of Roll, The Man of Roll. Do you know the Man of Roll which lives on Drury Rue" **Oh my god, so that's where Rick lives! *This troper wishes he had the screenshots of the really really weird Subtitling for S Tar Wars: Revenge of the sith. There was a time in which a character was saying something that supposedly translated to "And my pants went to Syria" in English. **You are presumably referring to the one that gave us Vader's Big No as Do Not Want? Try this one or this one. *This troper once came across a Dutch-to-English fansub for "Sta Paraat" ("Be Prepared"), the Villain Song from The Lion King.Dutch: "Al werkt jullie brein niet naar behoren functioneert slechts Ã©Ã©n enkele keer spits toch als het kan jullie oren het gaat om een kwestie van eer" Subtitles: "Although works your brain not as it should functions only one single time sharpen however if it's possible your ears it goes about a matter of honour" *This troper's friend was practicing Spanish with her, and her friend said "The ice caps are melting because of people like (Somebody in our class who doesn't care about the environment)." Which is a perfectly good sentence, except that she used "gustar", which means like as in "to be fond of" rather than like as in "to be similar to". So she was really saying "The ice caps are melting because people are fond of (That person)." *The mexican troper is exposed to this on a daily basis on subtitles and dubs for american movies, series, cartoons, etc., But probably the funniest example was found on a Star Trek movie (probably Insurrection, but could have been First Contact). The subtitles were done by professionals, for a movie theater showing, but apparently whoever was writing those subs, had no idea how to translate the simple word core, so he/she went by the rule of "any word in english is spanish if you put an 'o' at the end", and the subs came with "coro" as a translation for core in every line the word was used, and as you might now, in Star Trek the word core is used in every other line, the warp core is always undergoing something. The thing is "coro" is spanish for chorus, like in a group of people singing, so this troper spend the entire movie picturing in his head a group of children, deep withing the Enterprise, singing at the top of their lungs every time the ship had to go into warp. *The DSL modem this troper received from his ISP is full of those on its documentation. Apparently it was translated from Chinese to English, THEN to Portuguese (as, if you translate it from Portuguese back to English using Google Translator, the sentences are reasonably meaningful). Fortunately the modem software is in pretty decent English. *This troper decided to post one of his Facebook status updates in Japanese. **What he meant to translate to Japanese: "I want to go to the club meeting, but I have to do my term paper for Japanese class so I can't go." **What he typed: "［レイ］は［クラブの会議］に行きたいで、でも日本語のクラスのタームペーパーを行かなければなりません。" **What it translates back to: "Ray wants to go to club meeting, but he has to go to his term paper for Japanese class." This was pointed out by a friend who is more fluent in Japanese. Cue this troper doing a double Facepalm. *When this troper's friend bought a cheap pair of Korean headphones on the market, this troper remembered this trope and decided to check the instructions. Most of it was written in awakward Hebrew, but still understandable. Except for the one sentence that still remained a mistory to this troper, and roughtly translates to "Headphones will not work unless your teamwork sticks into." Category:Troper Tales